“Nouveau California,” she said. “The cheese is from a farm up near Caspar and the nasturtiums are out of my own garden. You’ll notice that they’re green instead of orange. That wasn’t easy, and I won’t tell you how I accomplished it, but I will say that the flavor of these canapés is unique.”
“Just ate,” Howard said, as if he regretted it vastly but couldn’t do anything about it beyond that. He patted his stomach and tried to imagine what gruesome liquids Mrs. Lamey had stained the nasturtiums with—pulverized tomato worms, probably.
Just then there was a squeal, like a piglet with its foot caught in a gopher hole, followed by the sound of a champagne glass smashing down onto the kitchen floor, a burst of shrill laughter, and someone being slapped. Mrs. Lamey looked up sharply, along with the two men, and in that instant, when their eyes were on the kitchen, Howard poured his champagne out into a potted plant and then set his glass down decisively on the coffee table as if he had drained the glass at a single gulp.
Ms. Bundy stepped out of the kitchen and into the living room, looking back over her shoulder, her face livid. “You’d screw a chicken,” she said, “if you could get close enough to it without making it blind or sick.”
Stoat bent over in Howard’s direction and said, “Gwen is very witty. That’s the key to the success of her poetry.” He winked cheerfully. “She doesn’t like men touching her, though, even if it’s Glenwood Touchey. They’re a pair, Glenwood and Gwen, but she’s afraid he might heat up untapped passions. Her verses couldn’t stand it. They’d have to be written on asbestos.”
Mr. Touchey came out looking sour-faced, and the artist, taking his cigarette holder out of his mouth, said, “Don’t touch me, Touchey,” in an effeminate voice, which drew an intake of breath from Mrs. Lamey, who asked very sincerely whether Ms. Bundy was all right.
“You old whore,” the poetess said to her, and stalked off down the hallway in the direction taken ten minutes earlier by Reverend White. Mrs. Lamey looked sincerely hurt and then a little puzzled, like a mother insulted by her daughter. Moments later there sounded a titter of laughter from a distant corner of the house, which seemed to infuriate Mr. Touchey and Mrs. Lamey about equally. The artist winked at Stoat, and Howard stood up and moved off toward the kitchen, carrying his cane.
“Champagne out here?” he asked Mrs. Lamey, nodding in that direction.
“In the ice bucket. Be liberal with it.”
There was the ice bucket on the kitchen counter. Howard poured himself a glass but didn’t taste it, looking around at the furnishings and the layout of the kitchen. Through a glass door at the back lay a service porch, and beyond that a door, which, if he had things laid out clearly in his mind, must lead out to the backyard and the alley. Left down the alley would be Ukiah Street and Little Lake and the bluffs beyond; right would lead past the blocked-up Volkswagen bus, back toward Main Street. In a pinch, he could head up Little Lake toward the highway and reach Pine Street, where Sylvia was hustling crystals and herb teas.
No one had followed him into the kitchen, and he could hear conversation rattling away in the living room. So he poked his head around the door and into the ill-lit service porch, which was immense, with a couple of big pantry cupboards, a washer and dryer, and a service-porch sink. It was carefully organized, with a big metal-boxed first-aid kit hung on the wall alongside a fire extinguisher. The linoleum floor was waxed like glass. After glancing over his shoulder he stepped across and unlocked the back door, both a chain lock and a dead bolt, and then went back out into the kitchen, where he pretended to study a row of hanging pots and pans made of polished copper.
“Do you cook, Mr. Barton?” asked Mrs. Lamey from the doorway. She regarded him almost happily, as if something had happened to restore her.
“Can of Spam now and then,” Howard said. “I’d love to have a set of copper pans, although they’d probably be wasted on me.”
“Well, truthfully,” she said, “they’re rather wasted on me, aren’t they? I buy most of my food at the deli. I’m too busy for domestic chores. The kitchen was designed by one of the foremost decorators on the West Coast, though, a man from Palo Alto. Do you like it?”
“It’s beautiful,” Howard said truthfully. “I love the mossy color of the counter tile. It’s perfect with this white linoleum. How do you keep it spotless like this? Is there some kind of trick to it?”
“Yes. Never cook in your kitchen, and avoid walking on the floor whenever you can. My decorator insisted on it, though. He drove up here personally to study the climate and landscape. He spent a week in town before he laid a hand on my kitchen. It was a matter of studying my personal space, vis-à-vis the concrete units of my existence. It was very complicated, I assure you, but I think he succeeded admirably. I learned a great deal from him—modes of perception.”
She paused for a moment as if summoning the right words, and then said, “I’ve paid attention to your space, Howard, over the last few days, and the place you occupy in the local—what?—universe, you might say. I’ve become a shrewd judge of people, of human frailty. You’re a puzzler, though, aren’t you?” She took a good look at the cane right then, seeming to see it for the first time. There was something like surprise in her face, which, disappeared at once. She turned toward the sink with a distracted air, cranking on the water and rinsing the already clean porcelain.
Howard shrugged, trying to think of something to say about his “space” but unable, really, to catch her drift. “It’s a strange world you all seem to inhabit up here,” he said. “I felt a little like an outsider, a tourist, when I got up here a few days ago. I guess that’s partly why I’m here, you know. To strike up a few new acquaintances, get to know a couple of people. Don’t want to be the only living boy in New York and all that.” He smiled at her.
“New York?” she said, a little puzzled.
“Just a saying from a popular song.” What would Uncle Roy do in my shoes? he wondered, raising his still full champagne glass at Mrs. Lamey. Then he asked, “What on earth is that?” and squinted out toward the window of the living room.
Mrs. Lamey spun around to look, expecting heaven knew what, and Howard dumped half his champagne down the sink. Outside, the moon was higher and the night had lightened. Bennet’s Humpty Dumpty waved frantically at them from across the street, driven by the wind. Howard hadn’t meant to call attention to it, specifically, but Mrs. Lamey apparently thought he had. “That’s a nuisance,” she said. “An eyesore and an insult.”
‘This is first-rate champagne,” Howard said, grinning loopily at her and topping off his glass again. “I’m drinking too much of it.”
“Nonsense,” she said, brightening up. “That’s an interesting sort of walking stick you have there. Is it decoration, mostly?”
“Not really. I’m sort of lame these days. Minor knee injury.”
“Do you mind if I have a look at it? It quite fascinates me.”
“Sure,” Howard said. “I don’t mind.” He handed Mrs. Lamey the cane, knowing that he shouldn’t but not really seeing how to avoid it. Still it was obvious that letting her examine the thing wouldn’t cause him any real trouble.
Ms. Bundy came up just then and slipped a hand through the crook of Mrs. Lamey’s arm. Her face was flushed and her hair disheveled.
“Glenwood has come up with a first-class idea,” the poetess said, and she whispered it into Mrs. Lamey’s ear, giggling just a little.
“Oh, that’s naughty!” Mrs. Lamey said.
Ms. Bundy let go of the old woman and took Howard’s arm now. “He’s not any kind of wallflower,” she said. Her khaki blouse was unbuttoned halfway to her navel and she was clearly braless underneath. She rubbed against Howard’s arm seductively, and she tossed her hair out of her face and cocked her head at him, giving him a sort of come-hither look. He knew that he ought to be repelled by it; the more pleasant the company became, the more dangerous it was.
The fingers of her left hand snaked around his waist,
vaguely tickling him, and he grinned crookedly.
“He’s not the daring sort,” Mrs. Lamey said, smiling at the two of them and unconsciously licking her lips.
“Stoat has his video camera with him,” Ms. Bundy said. “We can film it, all of it.” She adjusted her blouse, pushing it open indecently, as if by mistake.
“I don’t know,” Howard said, horrified now. He thought about the back door. Thank God he’d unlocked it. He could turn and bolt. Right now …
“Oh, I see what you thought I meant,” Ms. Bundy said, tittering through her fingers. “He is a naughty boy!”
“Let’s go!” shouted someone from the living room, and Touchey strode into view, waving the video camera that must have belonged to Stoat. Ms. Bundy opened her blouse for the camera, kissed Howard on the cheek, and curtsied. The Reverend White appeared just then behind Howard, carrying a ball-peen hammer, his face flushed with drink.
Howard very nearly ran for it. It was the hammer that did it. But Ms. Bundy shouted “We’re off!” just then, and hauled Howard into the living room.
“Where?” Howard shouted back at her, determined not to show his fear. This was what he had come for, wasn’t it? Of course it was.
“To kill the Humpty Dumpty!” Ms. Bundy yelled, and led Howard and the rest of them out into the night.
22
“NOT going along, Stoat?” Touchey asked in a sneery voice. He stopped on the front porch, talking back into the house. Stoat stood up and headed toward them, shaking his head. Reverend White trained the video camera on Jason the artist, who looped his arm around Touchey’s shoulder and struck a pose, turning to profile and drawing on his cigarette holder.
“Malicious mischief isn’t in my line,” Stoat said. “This sort of prank leaves me rather cold, I’m afraid. And it accomplishes nothing at all. It’s frivolous. I don’t brawl.” There was a pettish tone to his voice, as if he thought he was being picked on.
“Howard’s going to pound it,” Gwendolyn Bundy said.
“Pound it!” Reverend White laughed out loud. “I dare say he will if you don’t keep your hand out of his pants.” He pinched Ms. Bundy on the flank, and she turned and slapped playfully at him.
“Come on, Stoatie,” she said. “Don’t you want to see Howard get tough? He’s the spitting image of one of those quiet detectives with steel fists, isn’t he? My kind of man. Drinks Scotch out of an office bottle and calls women dames. He’s going to wax manly with Humpty Dumpty—show it no mercy at all. Isn’t that right, Howard?” She grinned into his face and moistened her lips, flicking her tongue at him. Her breath smelled of champagne.
“That’s right,” Howard said. “No mercy at all.” He hesitated, though, on the porch, remembering Graham’s cane—his cane—and he turned to look back through the window, into the well-lit living room where Stoat had sat back down in a sulk. Mrs. Lamey had evidently put it down somewhere. She waved at him happily, like somebody’s mother sending a pack of children out on a scavenger hunt.
The idea of losing the cane panicked him. He was a fool to have brought it here in the first place—although he couldn’t quite say why—and he was a double fool for letting it out of his sight. “My cane,” he said, slapping his forehead. “I’d better get it.”
“Later,” Ms. Bundy said decisively. “We’re only going across the street. We’re not going to make an evening of it. This is a sort of guerrilla raid. Slash and burn. We’ll come back and play with your cane later.”
Howard was doubtful, but he let himself be led away through Mrs. Lamey’s front-yard garden. He had no idea what sort of high jinks they were up to, but it was true, apparently, that they were only going across the street. The sea wind was cold; there was no way they’d be out long.
“It’s a battle in the art wars,” Glenwood Touchey said. “All that cut-out crap in that front yard makes me sick.”
“Throw up for us, Glen,” Ms. Bundy said. “Get sick. I love performance art.”
“I’ll show you performance art,” Touchey said, skipping across the street toward Bennet’s house and kicking a wooden pansy into the air.
“Hey!” Howard shouted, taken utterly by surprise, but his shout was lost when Reverend White howled out a drunken whoop and followed along behind Touchey, chasing him with the camera. Ms. Bundy pulled up a pair of long wooden tulips and tossed one to Jason. The two of them began to fence with the tulip stems, trampling back and forth across the lawn and through the flower beds.
All of them were kept quiet now, giggling and challenging each other in hushed tones. Howard stood watching. He had to do something to stop it, but, like Stoat, he didn’t like the idea of brawling, and he didn’t want to lose his cane, either. Their antics reminded Howard of when he and his friends had toilet-papered lawns when he was a teenager, except that this was malicious and somehow deadly serious. They were making a hash of Bennet’s flower garden for some ulterior purpose that he only barely understood, unless it was just pure, idiot meanness.
“Come on,” Ms. Bundy said to him, lunging toward him with a tulip and jabbing him in the crotch with it. “Don’t be a jerk. Have some fun for a change.” Her blouse was half untucked and pushed all askew by now, another button having been lost in the tulip skirmish. It was clear that she was just warming up. Her eyes blazed, and there was a sadistic look in them that propelled Howard a step backward toward the curb.
It occurred to him abruptly that there were worse things waiting, that this smashing-up-the-Humpty-Dumpty prank was nothing more than a prelude for grander, more depraved things later in the evening—things involving him.
Mrs. Lamey stood on her front porch now, watching. Her red kimono flapped in the sea wind, and her hair blew straight out away from her head so that skinny and painted and powdered in the light of the porch lamp, she looked like something that had crept up out of a subterranean bordello. She waved at Howard, as if to encourage him, and then stepped back into the house and shut the door, having nothing more to do with the nighttime frolic.
He shrugged submissively as Ms. Bundy grabbed his arm and wrestled him toward the Humpty Dumpty. She gouged him in the ribs and then thrust her hand into his pants pocket, pushing up against him and shoving her tongue into his ear, biting him hard on the lobe.
“Hey!” he shouted, pulling away and very nearly losing a piece of flesh. The Reverend White stood panting next to a wooden, man-milking-a-cow whirligig, bathed in light from the video camera. One of his eyes jumped with a massive twitch, and there was a runnel of drool along his mouth. He handed the camera to Jason and then grabbed the cow with both hands, yanking it off its stake, throwing it over the house, end over end like a Frisbee. “Raise a little hell,” he said to Howard, winking broadly.
Glenwood Touchey surged past just then with the hammer upraised, leaping up and swinging it at the Humpty Dumpty. The thing was too high for him, though, and the blow was a feeble one. He cursed, taking another ineffective shot at it. “Damn it,” he said. “Reverend!”
“At your service,” Reverend White said, bending over. Touchey climbed onto his shoulders, and his horse stood up shakily, staggering and nearly pitching over. Touchey yelped, holding on, and then when they were nearly steady he grasped the Reverend’s collar like reins, and the two of them rushed at the Humpty Dumpty, which regarded them out of faintly Asiatic eyes, waving one last morbid goodbye at Howard, as if it knew it was about to undertake the fateful fall, had perhaps been waiting for it all evening.
Ms. Bundy grasped Howard’s hand, pulling him forward. She had the look in her eye of a lecher at a pornographic film. He dug his heels in, though, looking around, and then shrugged out of her grasp and stepped across to the post that had held up the whirligig cow, just as Touchey slammed away futilely at the egg man with his hammer again.
Touchey cursed out loud, furious with the painted sheet of vibrating plywood. He had his left hand curled into Reverend White’s hair now, and the preacher bucked and lunged, trying to shake him loose and yelling “
Ow! Ow!” so that half of Touchey’s blows hit nothing at all, but swung wide, the force of them nearly throwing him from the Reverend White’s shoulders.
Howard wiggled the stake out of the ground—a length of two-by-two fir painted white and some four feet long. Gripping it like a baseball bat a foot from the bottom end, he steeled himself, drew in a deep breath, and then shouted at Touchey, “No! Like this!” Jason moved in, flooding all of them in electric light, camera whirring as Howard set his feet. Reverend White backed away gratefully, wheezing, anxious to give Howard a chance.
“Swing away!” he said. “One for the Gipper!” He bent into a shaky crouch in order to tumble Touchey off onto the ground.
“Hey!” Touchey yelled, holding on like a rodeo rider, clearly nowhere near finished with the smirking Humpty Dumpty, and at that moment Howard said, “Sorry, Reverend,” and whipped the stake around, slamming the preacher across the stomach.
The preacher crumpled at the waist, his breath shooting out of him like wind from a rusty machine. Touchey shrieked and flew forward, face-first into the dirt, scattering wooden flowers and helplessly trying to throw his hammer at Howard, who sidestepped, turned at the same time, and smashed the heavy stake across the top of Jason’s video camera. There was a satisfying crack of something breaking, and a large black chunk flew off and skittered away down the sidewalk. Howard took a half-step back and swung again, smashing out the lamp in a spray of glass.
Ms. Bundy lunged in furiously, clawing at Howard, raking her fingernails across his neck. He spun around, swinging the stake deliberately high so that she was forced to fall to her knees as the club whizzed past overhead. Then, after aiming one last blow at Jason, who swung the ruined camera wildly at his head, Howard loped across the street, up Kelly toward town, flinging his club into the weeds of a vacant lot.
He was around the corner and into the darkness before they were after him, and without looking back he cut hard to the left, crawling into a row of bushes along Mrs. Lamey’s back fence.
The Paper Grail Page 30
